I'm co-founder of an award-winning design agency in Edmonton called Paper Leaf; this is where I ruminate on design, business, & the intersection of both. Other things that turn my crank: type, whisky, coffee, bicycling, and the NBA/NFL. Contact me at jeffreyarchibald [at] gmail.com.

Scope creep is awful. We struggled with how to handle it for years at Paper Leaf. It’s a tricky balance, isn’t it? We don’t want to be total doormats, but we’re also terrified to nickel-and-dime the client, or damage the relationship. In my experience, though, most agencies – including us, for a long time – end up on the doormat side, at the expense of our profits and our culture. After all, scope creep places stress on both those things, while also placing stress on the relationship side. Ultimately, scope creep is damaging in every regard in the long run – and running an agency is hard enough already.

Luckily, we’ve come to a good method of handling scope creep, and it’s super straightforward. Here’s how we handle it, so you can handle it too.

Losing proposals, and the potentially lucrative contracts that come with winning them, just plain sucks. You know you can do that job – knock it out of the park, even. But for some reason, the prospective client went in a different direction, leaving you, your proposal, and the hours that went into it in the good ol’ reject pile.

Sweet.

We’ve been there. I write a ton of proposals at Paper Leaf; some we win, some we lose. Over the years, though, we’ve refined our proposals and learned a lot about why we win the ones we do – and conversely, why we lose. And guess what? The reasons we lose proposals are likely the same reasons you lose yours.